Should Metal Be Allowed In Schools

In regards to the table above, we found several things to be interesting to the way these particular students think and form ideas. First off, the students we had interviewed were in either 5th or 6th grade, which means that it’s expected of them to think this task may be a little easy. However, most of the students except one, seemed to confuse metal objects, with non-metal objects. For this reason, we think the students formed ideas based on; if the object is heavy in anyway and appears to look similar to metal, then it must be metal. For example, Robbie and Marta both thought that a penny would attract metal. A penny is fairly dense and a little heavier than the objects that were not metal. Therefore, they placed in their minds that a penny could belong to the metal category. Being that, Metal is dense and thick as well a penny. In addition, Robbie and Marta thought that a soda can and metal fork …show more content…
Most of the student’s thinking was fairly accurate for the most part. There were some confusion on why, some metals do not attract magnets. In addition, the student’s thinking for the rule about how they think objects attract or have no effect on a magnet, were interesting. They all had their own way of interpreting the rule. We think that some of the student’s still don’t completely understand that, not all metals are attracted to magnets. However, Robbie’s rule displayed a better understanding of the activity, after completing his investigation in part one. For example, he said that “only metals are attracted to magnets, but not all metals,” His reasoning shows us that he is aware that only certain metals are attracted to magnets. Furthermore, we think that some students tend to categorize objects based on appearance and similarities, but there concept of how magnets work around objects are creative and mostly